This American Life "Stories Pitched By Our Parents" on AM 1370

This American Life "Stories Pitched By Our Parents" on AM 1370

A contraption that Robyn Semien's dad (John Semien) invented, allowing him to control the windows, ignition, etc (long before these things were automated).

Credit: This American Life

The 400th episode of This American Life will feature stories pitched from each of the producers' parents... brilliant concept, or nepotistic folly?

Almost all the producers at This American Life have had the same experience: We've been pitched stories by our parents. In the past, we've invariably rejected these story ideas—either out of petulance, or because the idea was too big, or too small, or simply terrible. But this week, for our 400th episode, we pay our parents the respect they are due: Each producer solicited ideas from a parent, and chose one idea to pursue, lousy or not. Then, once we hear each other's stories, we vote on whose story turned out..."best." Brilliant concept, or nepotistic folly? Find out this week. This American Life airs Thursday, February 18 at 9 p.m. on AM1370/FM-HD91.5-2.

About This American Life:

One of our problems from the start has been that when we try to describe This American Life in a sentence or two, it just sounds awful. For instance: each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn't sound like something we'd want to listen to on the radio, and it's our show.

So usually we just say what we're not. We're not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We're not really formatted like other radio shows at all. Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them. There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun.

Each episode has a theme. That's mostly because a theme makes it seem like there's a reason to sit and listen to a story about a contest where everyone stands around a truck for days until only one person is left on their feet...or a grown man trying to convince a skeptical friend that not only has he heard the world's greatest phone message, but that it's about the Little Mermaid...or a man who's obsessed with Niagara Falls, lives minutes from the Falls, writes and thinks about the Falls all the time, but can't bring himself to actually visit the Falls because, as he says, "they've ruined the Falls." If you're not doing stories about the news, or celebrities, or things people have ever heard of elsewhere, you have to give people a reason to keep listening. The themes make it seem like you should.

We view the show as an experiment. We try things. There was the show where we taped for 24 hours in an all-night restaurant. And the show where we put a band together from musicians' classified ads. And the show where we followed a group of swing voters for months, recording their reactions to everything that happened in the campaign, right up through their final decision. And the show where one of our contributors went on a fast to find out if doing that sort of thing leads, as promised, to enlightenment.

We think of the show as journalism. One of the people who helped shape the program, Paul Tough, says that what we're doing is applying the tools of journalism to everyday lives, personal lives. Which is true. It's also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.

Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it's fiction that describes what it's like to be here, now, in America. What we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic at the same time.

We sometimes think of our program as a documentary show for people who normally hate documentaries. A public radio show for people who don't necessarily care for public radio.

This American Life started in 1995 in Chicago. It went national in early 1996 and in the years since, it's won a lot of awards—the Peabody, the duPont-Columbia, the Murrow, and the Overseas Press Club, to name a few. Ira Glass, the host of the show, was named best radio host in the country by Time Magazine. And the American Journalism Review declared that the show is at "the vanguard of a journalistic revolution."

The program is on more than 500 public radio stations across the country. They say 1.7 million people listen to us on the radio each week, which sometimes is hard to imagine. Thanks for listening.